Brandon Donnelly

Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.

Here’s how he went about that:

• He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia
• He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area
• The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada
• Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts

Here are the results:

And here’s one thing he had to say about them:

Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn’t the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.

For a lot more information on this topic, click here.